‘A pox on both parties” many voters justifiably say. Money, most of it big, much of its source secret, dominates races at all levels. Congress remains dysfunctional. Preservation in office takes precedence over principle. The ads are incessant and insulting. Voting is a duty, but voting for the lesser of two evils makes it an unpalatable one. But don’t sit it out. Who becomes president matters, perhaps more now than ever before.
People who wrongly believe that there is no difference between the political parties and their standard-bearers say they’ll vote for a third-party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party or former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, a Libertarian. Don’t do it. Neither has a chance in Hell of being president. It would be a wasted vote, most analysts say. But would it?
A wasted vote would be one that had no effect on the election’s outcome. This year, as it did in 2000, a vote for a third-party candidate could swing the election. The catch is, it could swing it in favor of the greater rather than the lesser of the two evils. The differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, in experience, knowledge, temperament and, to the extent Trump has them, positions, is profound. Trump believes that global warming, perhaps the most important issue of all, is a hoax. Clinton accepts its reality and would carry on President Obama’s aggressive plan for a speedy transition away from fossil fuels. Clinton is measured; Trump is mercurial and impulsive.
The next president will get two or more nominations to the Supreme Court. Clinton would appoint justices that realize that the Constitution was not intended to be a document frozen in time but one that should evolve while preserving basic principles and the republic. Trump would appoint “originalists” in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. The next court will determine much about life in America in the next generation.
Clinton would preserve a woman’s right to control her own health destiny. Trump would severely abridge it. Clinton would push to raise the minimum wage and reform the tax code to reduce the greatest disparity between America’s rich and the rest since the age of the robber barons. Trump supports tax relief for the wealthy and argues that the benefits will trickle down to the masses when the rich create jobs and grow the economy.
Clinton has dealt at the highest levels of diplomacy and is a master of public policy. She was in the room when the president decided, at tremendous risk, to deploy a SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden. Trump has never been elected to anything, knows little about the workings of anything but business, and as his performance in the first debate proved, cannot control his temper.
In 2000, third-party voters who cast their ballots for Ralph Nader in New Hampshire and Florida guaranteed the presidency of George Bush. The Supreme Court, in the most shamelessly partisan act in its history, cinched the deal.
Gore lost New Hampshire by 7,000 votes; Nader got more than 22,000. He lost Florida by 537 votes; Nader received nearly 100,000. Nader’s argument that the votes would have split equally or come predominantly from Bush didn’t withstand analysis.
Ultimately, third-party voters that year gave the nation two unending wars, the deaths of some 6,800 U.S. troops and about the same number of U.S. contractors, and a half-million or more deaths in Iraq alone. Third-party voters that year also gave America the worst financial downturn since the Great Depression, a recession whose effects are still being felt.
A vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson could have similar, perhaps worse, results.